


half-human

by lordofthedreadfort



Category: Trainspotting (1996)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-05
Updated: 2017-02-05
Packaged: 2018-09-22 05:35:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,173
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9585692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lordofthedreadfort/pseuds/lordofthedreadfort
Summary: At the risk of sounding like a twat, Renton has always thought there was something metaphysical about him and Sick Boy.(spoilers for the end of T2)





	

What comes after a near death experience is the white-hot intensity of continuing to live.

First, there is the raw, scraping pain of withdrawal; a body guttered and spoiled, churning and twisting against itself, bewildered by the continuing need to provide life. Then, once the physical symptoms have subsided, the constant ebb and flow of emotion. One minute there is just blunt emptiness – the next, a gaping, sickening horror that seems to constantly loom over him – then back to apathy, everything weak and filmy under the light.

The third is Renton’s least favourite, although perhaps simply because it comes after the other two. It is the stage he is at now: unbearably aware of his own body, every slight sensation, every touch, every shudder, every brush of fabric against fabric. Whereas before it had receded into the background of his awareness, becoming nothing more than a patchwork quilt of blue-green veins to tap and inject, now it seems to greedily expand in its sensitivity. A hand on his shoulder makes him jolt in alarm.

Sick Boy’s mouth on his cock seems to be setting him on fire.

Renton’s breaths are shuddering out of his chest in an embarrassing, confused mess of half-sounds as Sick Boy licks a slow, taunting stripe up the underside of his cock, his mouth wet and heated. It’s a dizzying sensation, and  somehow the only sense Renton can made through the humming, empty noises in his brain is remembering his mother saying how nice Young Simon is, how sweet, what good manners, and the thought is enough to drive him to near-hysteria. He laughs convulsively, but the laughter is more a wrenching sob which hooks deep in his chest. Sick Boy breathes a delighted sigh in response, and Renton twists his fingers in the soft bed of Sick Boy’s ridiculous hair, idly noting the off-coloured roots with an abject fascination as he pulls.

“No so hard,” Sick Boy counsels in a low reprimand, but he swirls his tongue around the tip of Renton’s cock as a perverse reward so Renton pulls tight again, white-knuckled, demanding, the tips of his fingers feeling numb with the shivering sensitivity of his lower half. The grip is the only way to anchor himself in this shuddering, twitching body, which jolts to every slight movement of Sick Boy’s tongue, as though his body is being unmade and made again to the directive of Sick Boy’s mouth.

Just as he is about to come, Sick Boy pulls back sharply, wiping his mouth with his forearm and smiling up at Renton.

“Th' fuck?” Renton manages to breathe out, feeling almost sick with desire. He barely notices Sick Boy scrambling to his feet; in fact, he notices very little at all beyond the roaring in his ears and the unbearable weight of being anchored in his body until Sick Boy presses him down on the bed, one hand circling Renton’s cock as he pushes deep inside him. Sick Boy’s breath ghosts against the nape of his neck as Renton is animated once more into life, gasping out an aborted approximation of Sick Boy’s name as he comes, embarrassingly quickly, into Sick Boy’s hand.

 

* * *

 

Renton had imagined when first considering the possibility of Sick Boy and, well, _men_ , that he wouldn’t be the one on his knees. It had been difficult to imagine the sight of Sick Boy willingly lowering himself to the floor, working for someone else’s pleasure – and it takes a while for Renton to separate that image from what Sick Boy is really thinking. There is something dangerously vulnerable about being on the receiving end, of having your thoughts and control whittled away to a dull whine in the back of your brain. It is one thing to offer it up as sacrifice to heroin. It is another thing entirely to offer it to a person who will not soothe your pains.

“Ah feel like ah’m at confessional,” Sick Boy had said once, angling his jaw up towards Renton with a knowing smile.

“Dinnae make it weird,” Renton had muttered in response, feeling oddly stung by the insinuation.

“Weird?” Sick Boy challenged. His eyes were glowing like hot coals, and Renton imagined they were boring right through him. Sick Boy’s hands brushed over the material of Renton’s jeans, purposely teasing, purposely provoking, and it had been so long since anyone has sucked his cock that Renton felt like a virgin all over again, his breath hitching in the back of his throat at the sensation. “Ah’m jis setting the mood.”

That is what Sick Boy does. He controls the mood. He controls Renton’s reactions. He controls everything, really. And Renton obliges him.

 

* * *

 

There are clear trigger-points that neither of them talk about. They are all on Sick Boy’s end, naturally; there is very little that is sacred about Renton’s own life, even if occasionally the way Sick Boy prompts and pushes him is coupled with an almost boyish smile, as if he knows he is doing something wrong but knows he will be allowed to continue anyway. But Sick Boy’s dealings; his family; embarrassing moments repressed violently in the past; Dawn; Renton avoids them with the concentration of a tightrope dancer.

Until he doesn’t.

“Ye ken whit yer problem is, Rent Boy?” Sick Boy asks him once, eyes and teeth flashing in one gloating moment of triumph, “Ye jis cannae help yerself. Ye’ll nair git oaf the smack. Ye jis dinnae have the incentive.” This is a favourite pastime of Sick Boy’s: declaring in grand, sweeping statements all the inner-most flaws of his friends, and occasionally near-strangers, as if he has cracked the secret to the universe.

“Aye,” Renton agrees, feeling a stab of sullenness twist in his chest. It’s not that he disagrees with Sick Boy, of course; only he doesn’t like the self-congratulating way Sick Boy goes about it. “Ah’d raither be oan the smack aw mah life than have yer sort ay incentive though.”

“Whit dae yer mean?” Sick Boy counters, too quick, before sudden realisation flashes across his face in a brief ripple. Renton feels momentarily sorry – he is about to apologise, _ah wis oot ay order, Si, ah dinnae mean it, we wis aw sorry aboot wee Dawn although admittedly ah’m no sure thir’s any correlation or whitever thay call it between the two_ – but he swallows the words sharply as Sick Boy punches him in the face, the force of the hit radiating through his skull.

This is what he thinks of, partly, as he considers Sick Boy asleep on the floor of the hotel, face pressed against the thin line of carpet. The bag with the money is slung over his shoulder and feels as though it is burning a hole in his side; he imagines the bruising reverberation of Sick Boy’s punch is still shuddering through his cheekbone, rattling his teeth. It is difficult to decide how one feels about Sick Boy – this is the crux of the matter for Renton. Everything about Sick Boy seems to churn him up with violent, unfathomable emotion.

Renton only looks at him for a moment, for the sensations are disquieting. They are dwarfed a moment later by the sight of Spud watching him move around the hotel room, unshed tears glimmering against his pupils – but this is only because Renton’s feelings about Spud are a lot easier to straighten out.

_Ah need ta git oot ay here_ , Renton thinks desperately, suspended in the twin accusations of Spud’s gaze and Sick Boy’s unknowing complacency. The hotel room feels like a grave – like he is being buried alive.

 

* * *

 

What comes after a near death experience is the slow, ragged pull back to life.

For a long time there is merely the white fog of near-suffocation, interrupted only by a blind panic that causes him to thrash and flail as though going through withdrawal all over again. There is Begbie’s soft, crooning voice somewhere in the distance, and it feels as if it should be comforting but Mark knows it cannot be because it means danger, because it is the downward pull of gravity, because after he hears it everything goes very faint for a while.

Then he is on the floor, cheek pressed against the creaking floorboards of Simon’s pub, heaving wet breaths out of his chest. He is suddenly far too alive for his body to contain and every exhale seems to split him apart. But he doesn’t have the luxury of allowing his body to collapse into itself, for Simon is pulling him up, and Begbie is there, and he might die yet.

There is something comforting about that. About closure. The past twenty years have collapsed in on themselves, until it feels Mark has merely been treading water in anticipation of this confrontation: with Spud, who had loved him ceaselessly and unthinkingly; with Simon, who had recoiled like a tightly wound spring but who had gravitated towards him like a magnet with an opposing pole; with Begbie, who was the beginning and end. To have a life that stretches on beyond this particular encounter seems foreign. _Thirty years_ he had emphasised to Simon – what to do with thirty years? But now, what to do with one? With five? Everything he does collapses into impermanency.

Looking at Begbie’s prone body on the floor, Mark can’t feel anything.

Until Simon touches him on the arm, brief and fleeting. His touch burns until it seems Simon’s fingerprints have sunk permanently into Mark’s skin; until he has been marked, forever, by this moment. _Ah’m alive_ , he thinks distractedly, but he doesn’t know what that means.

 

* * *

 

“Ah’m no surprised she’s goane,” Mark says bravely into the quiet. only allowing himself to flick his gaze to his left after a solid five seconds have passed to gauge Simon’s expression. “She wis wasting her time wi both ay us.”

“Ah’m no surprised she left ye,” Simon responds churlishly, betraying nothing but the briefest twitch of irritation. “Ye radge cunt. Couldnae look at her without panting like a dog.”

Mark thinks briefly of Veronika; her heavy eyes, the sleek purr of her voice. He can’t remember what it had been like inside of her – all he can think of now is Simon’s video, the determined thrust of her hips recorded for posterity, her watching him as he had watched her.

“She wis nice to look at,” he agrees finally, wavering between provoking Simon and letting him be, and deciding for once to settle with the latter. This decision makes him feel very superior for a moment, as if he has been cleansed from the inside out by his generosity. He wonders if Simon is equally as grateful. Probably not.

“Ah cannae believe we’re here again,” Simon says suddenly, straightening up from his slouched position on the couch. “Nae money. Nae prospects. Ye an me still here, wasting oor fuckin’ lives.”

“Unforeseen circumstances,” Mark supplies. “Ye cannae plan for that.”

“Aye,” Simon agrees darkly. “History repeating itself.”

“Ah, c’moan,” Mark cajoles, tapping Simon’s shin with his foot. “My sixteen thousand seems pritty tame now, disnae it?”

Simon tilts his head to the side, fixing Mark with an indecipherable stare; there is something burning and blistering in the scrutiny, the lull, the becalmed stillness of a storm, and for a moment Mark can feel the off-beat hit of his heart in his eardrums. Then Simon laughs, the sound a short, half-manic burst embedded deep in his chest, and Mark laughs as well, and their shoulders bump companionably together as they fall back into their slouched positions.

“Christ,” Simon exhales. “One of these days, people will stoap taking advantage of mah good nature. Ah’m cruelly misused.”

“We both ken that Veronika nair took advantage ay yer so-called ‘good nature’,” Mark reminds Simon with a degree of smug superiority.

Later on, Simon pays him back for that remark by biting down on his tongue so hard he draws blood. It is as it has always been: wet and hot, and clumsy with twenty years’ distance, and Mark feels as though every nerve-end is being ignited as his teeth clatter against Simon’s.

When he drops to his knees in front of Simon, Mark remembers what he had said all those years ago with the positions switched, about being at confessional, about feeling as though he was in a holy place, and there is something purifying about glancing up to catch the light of Simon’s glowing eyes. Simon’s words reverberate in shocking waves around the inside of Mark’s head – Simon’s hands brush sweetly along the coves of Mark’s cheeks, and then push insistently down on the back of Mark’s head, urging him on – Simon’s broken, ragged breaths puncture the solemn silence of the room – and Mark feels finally as though he is being unmade and remade in the wash of Simon’s absolution.

What comes after a near-death experience is rebirth; doing the same things you have always done, but with the added, agonising urgency of understanding how quickly they can be ripped away.


End file.
